There is a longstanding general problem of providing proper management tools for incoming telephone communications, which has become more complicated as the basic telecommunications contents expanded. Starting originally with voice only communications, this media first grew to include wire-photo, facsimile, and teletext; and more recently has grown to include Short Message Service (SMS), streaming video, email, and the like. Also, there are a growing number of applications that are installed on end-user phone devices, and particularly on cellular phones; for instance, time management applications like calendar, location identifiers like a GPS. Often, these applications are not linked directly to the intra-personal communication activity that the phone device provides; and therefore are not employed to enhance intelligent communication using the device. Over the years, other types of applications have also come to accommodation with the telephone media, including electronic funds transfer, secure data transfer protocols, Internet, and the like. Simultaneously, telephone service providers have diversified their facilities to allow call forwarding, voice messaging, conference calls, and the like.
Now, since it has become apparent that there are many different classes of “typical” telephone users, numerous service convergence configurations have been proposed, developed, tested, and even standardized. Nevertheless, users often remain challenged by the complexity of these configurations, while telecommunication service providers remain committed to find convenient facile interfaces for these often frustrated users.
More specifically, there remains a large measure of user resistance to new interfaces because of a long history of frustrations with getting “service” packages to actually allow the user to configure and/or manage desired services. Thus, on the one hand, there are many service interface combinations that are known; even if few of these have overcome the invisible barriers to popular use; and on the other hand, the “magic” combination of convergence and interface has remained a far from obvious mystery.
Typically, “Coverage” features (e.g. on-busy transfer to voice mail or to an alternate extension) are standard features available today. However, these capabilities are static; in that they revert to a minimum variability fixed-template behavior-response to all callers; as pre-defined in the system. Today's systems typically only offer coarse-resolution “decisions” between Busy vs. No Answer, between internal vs. external calls, or the like; which hardly exploit the intelligence capabilities of convergence combinations.
We will now list a few of the many telephone communications convergence combinations which have suggested user interface management protocols to help a user deal with multiple conflicting incoming content items. From this, one can appreciate that there are many technical features which have to come into compliance in order for a package to actually operate at a reasonable level of reliability. This, in turn, has transformed the grand theoretical “Unified Communications” domain of telephony convergence into an endlessly-fragmented sparsely-populated map of trials and errors; finding specific niche markets while generally missing the mainstream.    U.S. Pat. No. 7,313,228 Dynamic call processing control;    U.S. Pat. No. 7,305,075 Telephone call messaging device;    U.S. Pat. No. 7,305,068 Telephone communication with silent response feature;    U.S. Pat. No. 7,286,649 Telecommunications infrastructure for generating conversation utterances to a remote listener in response to a quiet selection;    U.S. Pat. No. 7,272,563 Personal computer and scanner for generating conversation utterances to a remote listener in response to a quiet selection;    U.S. Pat. No. 7,266,190 System and method for managing communications;    U.S. Pat. No. 7,224,774 Real-time call control system;    U.S. Pat. No. 7,213,073 Call management system;    U.S. Pat. No. 7,136,462 Network speech-to-text conversion and store;    U.S. Pat. No. 7,133,504 Non-voice completion of voice calls;    U.S. Pat. No. 7,123,707 Methods of controlling communications with at least two calling party devices by a user of a called party device;    U.S. Pat. No. 7,106,852 Telephone accessory for generating conversation utterances to a remote listener in response to a quiet selection;    U.S. Pat. No. 6,950,503 Method and system for facilitating mediated communication;    U.S. Pat. No. 6,853,710 Telephone call messaging device;    U.S. Pat. No. 6,850,604 Method and system for sending a data message to a calling phone while communicating with a first phone;    U.S. Pat. No. 6,823,184 Personal digital assistant for generating conversation utterances to a remote listener in response to a quiet selection;    U.S. Pat. No. 6,741,678 Method and system for sending a data response from a called phone to a calling phone;    U.S. Pat. No. 6,404,860 System and method for internet call management with text-to-speech messaging;    U.S. Pat. No. 6,018,671 Silent call accept;    PCT/IL2008/000236 (WO 2008/102365) System and method for telephone communication;    20070121901 Providing answering message options for answering calls; and    WO/2004/088854 Apparatus, system, and method for providing silently selectable audible communication.
Typically, what one comes to appreciate after reviewing so many sort-of similar patents is that there remains a clear need in telecommunications, but that the special narrow combination of features and interfaces is far from obvious to the man of the art.
Summarizing, in a critical aspect, the problem is to provide facile user-simple means of fast non-disruptive call handling for incoming calls, which meets the actual needs of the ordinary user.